I've always gotten good overall student evaluations. But having looked at so many files of applicants over the years, it's really hard to know what "good" is. Most evaluations look the same as mine. Of course what I'm viewing there is a selected sample.
But I recall sitting at a presentation where a commenter on a paper on student evaluations handed out pieces of paper with the numbers 1-5 on them and asked us to rate the presentation from 1-5 with 1 being worst. He then said that he would bet his life that the average rating was 4. That's how I rated the presenter and from the looks of others in attendance, they rated her as I did. The commenter's point was that evaluations are essentially meaningless.
One of the things about a college education, especially a liberal arts education, is that it's supposed to provide students with the necessary tools for lifelong learning. Here's a previous blog post that describes my interaction with someone who had my dad as a teacher at Morningside 45 or so years ago:
About 13 years after I graduated, I was working on a project for the Missouri Training and Employment Council (MTEC). My colleagues and I had to make a short presentation to some of the MTEC officials. In the morning before our presentation-, I was introduced to several people affillitated with MTEC, including a man named John Wittstruck*. John and I got to talking and he asked me if I was originally from Missouri. I told him that I had been living in Missouri for about 8 years, but I originally hailed from Sioux City, Ia. He perked up. He asked me where I went to college and I told him Morningside. He then asked me when I graduated. I told him 1988. He extended his hand and exclaimed "Class of 1964."
It's a small world, indeed!
We talked about Morningside and realizing that he would have been there when my father was an assistant professor, I asked him if he knew Dr. James Miller. He asked me why I asked and I told him Dr. Miller was my dad. He leaned towards me, took my hand again, gave it a big shake and said, "That man taught me how to think." John told me a story of the first test my father gave to students in John's class. It was a very hard test and many students did poorly, but John said that it was that test and the way my dad encouraged students to think about history that taught John how to think.
One of the things I don't like about giving evaluations (from a general viewpoint) is that they give an incentive to professors to give students something of value today (extra credit... easy tests... etc.) that won't facilitate lifelong learning. One of the things I developed in college was discipline to get things done by a fixed deadline. Had my professors been easy on students, I might not have gotten that discipline. I also learned that better work came through harder work. The fellow who alluded to my dad developed an ability to think in part because my father was not an easy professor - he was a hard ass (but a reasonable one, I'm told). But professors cannot be judged on how their teachings affect their former students as they go on throughout their lives.
While student evaluations do provide some useful feedback, they also raise the costs of being a hard-ass today... perhaps at the expense of students down the line.
*I mistakenly had him named John Wentworth in the original post.